Social networks that encode the relationships and interactions of individuals play a vital role as a medium for facilitating the sharing of ideas, thoughts, and information through the building of virtual networks and communities. Well-known applications of such social networks include viral marketing—for example, a company would like to hire the most influential opinion leaders to advertise a new product. To this end, the so-called influence maximization (IM) problem that aims at identifying a set of seed nodes, leading to the maximum influence spread under given influence diffusion models, was introduced as a formalization [1]}. In addition to (viral) marketing in social networks, efficient solutions to the IM problem stand to benefit applications in numerous domains such as microfinance [2]} and healthcare [3]}.
